Guantanamo Inmate Database: Asadullah Jan

McClatchy Newspapersby Tom LasseterJune 15, 2008

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan — Asadullah Jan was nervous. He'd asked an
American journalist to stay in the car when they met in the center of
Abbottabad, a mountain town on the edge of Pakistan's rough-and-tumble
North West Frontier Province.

The interview took place in a house at the end of several narrow
alleys, on the side of a hill, which Jan had agreed would be a safe
place to sit and talk for a few hours. Every time there was a noise in
the street or a knock next door, however, Jan tensed up and shut his
eyes, waiting for a door to be kicked off its hinges or a pistol to be
fired.

Pakistani security officials had told Jan to keep his mouth shut.
Like many former Guantanamo detainees living in Pakistan, he has to
check in regularly with police, and they watch his movements closely.

"The intelligence people bring me in often to ask who I've been
talking to," said Jan, 22, who does construction work in the
earthquake-hit town of Muzaffarabad.

Jan said that when he met last year with representatives of a
Western aid group — they wanted to know about his experiences in
Guantanamo and his treatment in Pakistan after he was released —
Pakistan's military intelligence service hauled him in for four days of
interrogations and threats.

Several other former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed in
Pakistan, Jordan and Russia said that they'd been subjected to regular
interrogations, beatings and surveillance since they were released from
Guantanamo.

Still, Jan said, it was better than a dusty prison camp in Afghanistan or the hot summer days sitting in a cell at Guantanamo.

Jan said he was 16 when Pakistani police arrested him in November or
December 2001 — he recalls that it was during the Muslim holiday of
Ramadan, but not the exact date — at a checkpoint in Kohat, Pakistan,
where he was on his way back from the Afghan province of Zormat.

Jan claimed that he was in Zormat, a hotbed of Taliban fighters, to
visit his extended family. There are no public transcripts from the
U.S. military that record the charge against him because he was
released before tribunals began at Guantanamo.

His route out of Afghanistan, however, was a popular one among the
Islamic militants who at the time were pouring into and out of the
country to fight U.S. forces and their Afghan allies after 9-11.

Jan's father, who was reached at his home by a Pakistani translator
working for McClatchy and who asked that his name not be used out of
concern for his safety, refused to talk about why his son had gone to
Afghanistan after the United States invaded the country. He said only
that Jan had been convinced to go by some friends and that, "I don't
want any more trouble."

After his arrest, Jan said, he was taken to the jail in Peshawar.
He'd been there for about a month, he said, when guards dragged him to
an interrogation room.

He said that three Americans, a woman and two men in civilian
clothes, were sitting at a table. The three didn't introduce
themselves, but their interpreter said they were with the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency.

The Americans had surprising questions, Jan said.

"One of them asked if I was the son of Osama bin Laden," he said,
shaking his head. "The Pakistani intelligence had told them this."

Jan tried to convince them otherwise, saying he was born to a family
of Afghan refugees in Pakistan who originally were from Zormat and that
he made regular trips back to his ancestral home.

The woman and two men listened to Jan's story. A few days later, in
early 2002, he was flown to the U.S. prison camp at Kandahar Airfield
in Afghanistan.

The welcome, Jan claimed, was unpleasant.

"They took us to a tent, and stripped off all my clothes and took
pictures of me naked, wearing shackles . . . the soldiers were laughing
at me," he said. "Then four of the soldiers came around me and began
kicking and punching me. I fell down and tried to stand up but they
kept hitting me. I could hear them laughing."

Dozens of other former detainees who were held at Kandahar and its
sister camp at Bagram Air Base described similar treatment. Replacing
the clothes of incoming detainees was standard procedure for hygienic
reasons, according to accounts by soldiers who served at the
installations.

At first, Jan said, he and 15 other men slept on the dirt, surrounded by a perimeter of concertina wire.

"We were sitting on the ground, in winter, with no blanket," Jan
said. "I had bruises on my body from the beating; my bones hurt."

About two weeks later, a tent was made. The detainees were given
Qurans. Some days were quiet, Jan said, while others were brutal. The
abuse, he said, never came during interrogations, but during the
countless hours spent in the tent, where the U.S. soldiers guarding
them had absolute power.

"Some of the soldiers were good. Some of the soldiers were no good; they were crazy," Jan said.

Jan said he was a witness in early 2002 when a guard dropped a copy
of the Quran into a bucket that detainees used for a toilet. Several
other former detainees who were at Kandahar at the same time described
similar incidents.

The U.S. military has denied that Quran abuse took place at
Guantanamo, but hasn't released any investigation of claims at
Kandahar. American defense officials have said that most stories of
detainee abuse and Quran mistreatment are lies.

One day, Jan said, the guards walked into the tents and grabbed men,
one by one, to blindfold and shackle them and then take them outside
the concertina wire, shoving and pushing them into a line.

Detainees were routinely shaved and given new clothes before their
flight to Guantanamo, but it wasn't possible to confirm whether that
procedure led to harassment by guards. Many former detainees said that
it did.

Jan said he weighed about 132 pounds when he was arrested. When he
was weighed at the intake clinic at Guantanamo, he was about 100
pounds, he said.

He said he was interrogated more than 100 times: What is your name?
Where are you from? Why were you in Afghanistan? Are you a member of
the Taliban? Are you a member of al Qaida?

The same questions, the same answers, day after day.

Jan was released after about two years.

"Whenever I come across something related to the Americans, to war,
in a newspaper or on TV, my mind goes back to that place," he said,
shifting uneasily on a sofa in the home of a man he didn't know, hoping
that he wouldn't be arrested for meeting with a reporter. "I never feel
relaxed. There's always something bothering me, there's always
something pressing down on my mind."

His eyes were worried. There had been about three hours of talking, and wondering about noises in the street.

"I used to be very healthy and good-looking," Jan said, pointing to
his receding hairline and haggard face. "But look at me now. You would
never guess that I'm 22."